Interning at The Dini Group has truly been an amazing experience for me. It has given me confidence in my programming skills, which in turn has allowed me to enjoy coding more. Programming is like a complex puzzle that needs solving. I first took a programming class, in Matlab, at UCSD the summer after my freshman year. I liked it but never felt convinced in my abilities. Last year when I interned at Qualcomm Thinkabit Lab this interested sparked again when I saw the passion that my mentor had for it. At this internship I worked on a painting robot that paints the user's portrait using a stippling technique. I designed it in CAD and started building it the following summer. This project got me back into coding and I taught my self a bit of Python in the process. I was not intimidated by programming anymore and decided I needed a better foundation to continue my painting robot as well as a prosthetic hand project I had started. So last semester I took Engineering Programming at USD, where I learned C. It gave me a glimpse at the endless possibilities of coding and this internship, at the Dini Group, has made that glimpse a bit bigger. Anytime I learn something new I realize how much I don't know about the subject. This is the case about programming for me and I appreciate that there is still so much for me to learn. I am excited to continue this internship over the summer and continue my studies in college in the coming fall. Life would be so dull if there was nothing to learn. I am now curious about developing my own user interface QT program or the processes of designing schematics for electronic boards or applications of FPGAs. I have endless amounts of questions about the world because I am learning so much. Everyday after work I feel so tired because my brain is stretched with so much new information...it's great! I still don't know what I am planning on doing after my undergraduate maybe I'll get a phd or go into industry or who knows maybe I'll start my own company. I am excited to learn and see where life takes me. Below are a few pictures of me in my college gear which is a metaphor for my current state in life. A nervous smile but excited for the unknown. That is how I felt on the first day of working at the Dini Group and that is how I now feel as I venture off to college. Just like my experience at the Dini Group I know college will be challenging but rewarding!
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My project during externship was to finish modifying the bom_diff program so that the parsing of the master bom files was more logically coded with more error messages explaining why things weren't working like they were suppose to. Throughout the entire externship I worked under Neal, my mentor, who helped me understand the existing program and come up with ways to make the flow of it nicer and easier to read. I measured my success day to day by how much I learned and how focussed I was, which in turn determined how much I got done. On a whole my success was measured by if I actually got the program working and modified to Neal's standards...which I accomplished. In life it's great to be rewarded on how hard you work, but that's not always the reality. Usually you are judged if you get the job done and how well you got that job done. I am proud of the meaningful contribution I made to the Dini Group and how the new and improved program I wrote allows them to catch mistakes in their schematic and bill of materials before they start the manufacturing process.
The work that I have done at the Dini Group is extremely helpful to my education and world outside of high school. Not only am I able to say that I had a paid engineering internship on my resume, but I also was able to learn from my mentor (and the internet) and grow my programming skills. I learned an entire new language which will certainly come in handy in the future whether that be for school or a robot I decide to build in my free time! I feel so inspired to work on my own projects after this internship and continue coding. This internship has shown me that even in unknown territory I can succeed and push through challenges. |